London Calling: A Creative Writing Seminar

Conducted in English

“When a man is tired of London, he is
tired of life.”

—Samuel Johnson

What
richer city landscape and culture to inspire writing than
London-town. This city where Shakespeare held court. William Blake’s on again, off again muse. Dickens’ social burden yet undying love. The
city to spawn Sherlock Holmes, Dracula, and James Bond. It is a city of
many guises, dominant across many historical eras, but still it remains the
city, the place called London. In this writing-based, thematic course, we
will immerse in the “place” of London as we walk its physical, temporal, and
cultural landscape. We’ll dive into relevant writings across genres,
exploring the London locales to inspire these works or where the writer lived
or was his frequent haunt. We will also delve into some of the
significant films and principle music inspired by or situated in the city of
London. In the last fifty years, in fact, music more than anything has
captured the sense of London in its time and place—songs from the likes of the
Beatles to the Clash, the Sex Pistols and Blur, Elvis Costello and Robyn
Hitchcock, and most recently Adele, Amy Winehouse, and P.J. Harvey. Other
writers considered in this course include: Samuel Pepys, Karl Marx, Elizabeth
Barrett Browning, Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, George Orwell, Dylan
Thomas, Graham Greene, Doris Lessing, China Mieville, and Zadie Smith.
Ultimately, through our study, experience, and imagining, each student will write
their own sense of London, its place, its mystery, its secrets, its nightmares
and dreams.